Nomad7674 asks: "I am part of a team helping to build a site for discussing SmartPhones (i.e. combo cell phone and data function devices). We are trying to become a one-stop shop for SmartPhone-related information and have run up against one brick wall that the Slashdot community may be able to help with. We want to document every operating system that can be sync'd with a Palm or PocketPC or Symbian device. We already have information on the biggies (Apple and Windows), on the moderates (Linux and the Unixes) and a few of the more obscure including Amiga and BeOS. But we seem to have exhausted the searches of Google, Alta Vista, etc. and the knowledge of the general community elsewhere. What experiences have other Slashdot readers had with syncing their Palm, PocketPC, or other PDA device with obscure OSes?"

dybdahl asks: "Now that Red Hat has changed the default character set to be UTF-8, none of the existing filenames that included local characters like æ, ø, å, (Denmark) are handled correctly by Konqueror or can be seen correctly with "ls" in a shell. Is there a tool out there that can convert an ISO8859-1 ext3 filesystem to UTF-8?"

MartinMotor asks: "I'm a Network Administrator for a company with approximately 200 users, and we just installed a shiny new PIX. Being the resourceful network geek type, I immediately started adding deny statements to kill off access to places where people can download evil cursed programs like HOTBAR. Is there anywhere out there where people like me are maintaining a list of IPs for spammers, spyware progs, and pop-uppers to add to our firewalls? I can't be the first person to have this idea."

An anonymous reader asks: "Our CTO, responsible for all hardware and networking setup, who also coincidentally happens to be our senior (and only) developer, has just resigned to go work for the competition. We are not a software company, but he's written proprietary code that we use on a daily basis to work. What interim measures should we be taking to ensure a smooth transition to the next person hired to take over? What can we do about security, since this person designed and implemented all current security procedures? What about ensuring that we have all the intellectual property to which we're entitled? As one co-worker put it: 'His resignation was a surprise to us, but it definitely wasn't a surprise to him.' If he wanted to leave some hard-to-find malicious timed-release back-door-opening code running, it's certainly within his means. We don't expect any malicious action, and can rely on a reasonable level of co-operation and documentation before he goes, but I want to get a sense of what others have done in this situation."

dmorin asks: "Like many of you I'm recently laid off. So as I wake up every morning wondering what to do with my day I got to thinking, how everybody else is handling the new found free time? My original idea, that I would simply spend all my time working on my own software projects in order to learn new skills, went out the window when I realized that I'd burn out far too fast if I thought that the most important thing in life. My wife is working part time so I have at least 3 days a week to take care of my 10month old daughter, time that I would not have had if I was still employed. I'm doing my share of the chores around the house, not just taking care of the lawn but also doing groceries, laundry and so on. As for geeky stuff, I play with projects and technologies because they are fun, not because I think they will make me more marketable. I put away my "personal Java portal" and lately am playing with voice synthesis on my Zaurus just because I think it's cool. So how about everybody else? What are you doing with this new free time that's been forced upon you? How much of it are you using to job search? How much is 'honey do' list, how much is just free play time? Disclaimer: I'm researching an idea for a possible book. Not planning to quote anybody without their permission, just looking to hear what people are up to."

Borgoth asks: "At my company we just broke 10 million pageviews per day. We use 5 2-processor 1U off-the-shelf Intel boxes running Apache, Linux, mod_perl, and MySQL. This averages out to about 2 million pageviews per day per server (about 20 million hits/server, including images). Most of our pages have some dynamism using mod_include SSIs, and maybe one pageview in five directly results in a db query. We think we should be pretty happy that we're doing so much with so little, but we don't really have any idea how much horsepower other sites are using in their server farms. So, what sort of webfarms do Slashdot readers maintain, and how does their performance compare?"

An anonymous reader asks: "Blender 2.26 is out and 2.27 is soon on its way. This powerful 3D modeling/animation/rendering program is released under the GPL so it (along with the source code) is free, there is only one downside: the learning curve is large due to is abnormal user interface. I am in High School (unfortunately) and I want to do something related to 3D animation (movies, games, special effects, etc.) when I get older. Which package should I choose? The free, but difficult, Blender? The amazing, but bankrupting, Maya? Or should I get another program that is cheaper than Maya but easier to learn than Blender? If we take money out of the picture which is the best program to learn about modeling/rendering/animating on?"

The Other White Meat asks: "I want to put a computer in my kitchen. For space reasons, I want to make it an LCD; a 15" screen would be perfect. This monitor is going to be exposed to harsh conditions (flying food, jumping cats, general mishandling). I don't want to spend so much money on it that if I came home and found it broken that I would be upset by it. I figured there must be plenty of places that will sell LCDs with dead pixels or columns, where I might be able to pick one up in the $50-100 range, but so far I have found nothing. Surely there must be a market for 'Grade B' LCD monitors, for precisely this sort of low life expectancy sort of usage? So fellow readers, can you succeed where Google® has failed, and lead me to the cheapo LCDs?"

hherb asks: "We are in the process of building and maintaining a free pharmaceutical reference database, in order to liberate medical decision support systems from vendor driven databases. For that purpose, we need some way of allowing multiple authors to contribute to a large number of data records - most of them small...too small for CVS. We need version tracking as well as authentication of authors. We need to tag every bit of information enterrred with information about source reference, author, peer review result, and so forth. I had a look at existing version tracking software. like CVS and Subversion, and I did not have the impression that any of them would suit our needs. Does anyone have ideas for *free* software solutions that we can use?"

elliotj asks: "With the widespread adoption of WIFI, I'm finding more and more places where I'd like to use the Internet on the road. All I really need is a linux command line to run SSH, links, and a few other things. What I'm looking for is a very lightweight subnotebook with a long battery life, quick sleep/wake times, that can run Linux and WIFI. I've looked at the Sony picturebook line and the Toshiba Librettos. Both are sweet machines, but have more features and are more expensive than I really need. Are there any cost effective options out there?"

Michael B asks: "I recently bought an 8 port KVM to switch between various workstations and servers at home, and I'm realizing what I can't switch is audio! I've seen 4 port audio/video type switches (for things like switching between video console systems) but this doesn't address more than 4 ports and having the adding RCA/S-Video is a waste. I've thought of building one from scratch using Radio Shack parts, but can't find any info, such as a schematic, online. Does anyone have any ideas or sources of info for this one? Belkin seems to make a 4 port KVM with audio, which would be nice, but I need more than 4 ports. Thanks for any help!" After a bit of digging, I found this monster, which does 8-port KVM and audio, but that weighs in at a hefty $500USD, which is rather expensive. Has anyone managed to find schematics to such switchers so that folks, who aren't afraid of soldering irons, can build their own?